It is now three weeks since a terror gang that opposes education broke into a girls school Borno State, Chibok Government Secondary School, and kidnapped over 250 students. The school had been closed because of attacks by "Boko Haram," but it was reopened for the girls to take their Senior School Certificate Exams, and despite the dangers, these girls showed up because they want to go on to university. Most of them are still missing. The international press seems more interested in Russia's machinations in Ukraine and the comic stylings of President Obama at the White House Press gala.
This is a time when a social media campaign that only requires of its participants that they retweet and share postings may actually make sense. How are people even supposed to know what's going on when the racist ravings of NBA owners and deadbeat Nevada ranchers take precedence in the news?
But I am not choosing to write about the horrors of misogyny or of fundamentalism here. I am, instead, wondering why it took me two weeks to get agitated about this story. The entire outrage here is a world that allowed this horror to take place and then did not respond to it. That is precisely what I did. I chose to believe that the Nigerian military would get right on this. I didn't see the need for 24/7 reporting on an absence of news, a la Malaysian Air Flight 370. It wasn't some other person who knew about this for two weeks without totally freaking out. It was me.
In the Nigerian press I have read recent stories that US Secretary of State John Kerry has promised our help in finding the girls. I have seen nothing similar in the US press; only assurances by Kerry that we will continue training the FGN army in counter-insurgency tactics. When I read the stories in the Nigerian press through to the bottom, I find the same quotes from Kerry, but apparently with a different interpretation.
In the US press I read that the Nigerian first lady, Madame Patience Jonathan is promising to go to Borno herself to coordinate the search for the girls. In the Nigerian press I read that she accused the girls' mothers of being Boko Haram and ordered two of them arrested.
Last Friday, almost three weeks after the kidnappings, I read that FGN President Goodluck Jonathan was about to "investigate" them, despite the "lack of cooperation" by parents. Today I read that he is going to find the girls.
All of this is unconscionable, but so is my delayed reaction. Two years ago, when she was 12, Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head, pointblank, while on her way to school in the Swat district of Pakistan. The Taliban also poisoned 150 girls at their school in Takhar Province, Afghanistan. I have not spoken out about these horrors. Now I am. But I cannot get exercised about the silence or ignorance of others when it took me two weeks to start worrying about this. I have no excuse.
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